By Cabel

Hello, my friends. It’s (Q2) of a (not-so) new year. That means it’s time to talk about Panic!

Here’s what we did in 2017, and where we’re going in 2018.

Releases

Transmit 5

2017 was all about Transmit 5, our long-awaited major update to your favorite truck icon.

It had been an astonishing seven years since we had done a major update to our file transfer app for macOS. We’d spent most of that time focusing on Coda, so we had a long list of things we wanted to address, and once we got started it took us a good couple of years to get it all done. The good news is that we landed virtually everything we wanted to land in 5.0. And we focused hard on quality and process, creating what I think is the most solid initial release of any app we’ve ever done, ever.

The improvements in the app were huge: speed was increased significantly. Eleven new cloud services were added. We added our fabled Panic Sync service, which remains free and secure. I’m really happy with our “Get Info Sidebar” and I wish it was in the Finder itself. We added a Batch Renamer. We built a great UI for managing private keys. I could go on and on.

After shipping, we naturally collected feedback and we addressed most requests in the just-released Transmit 5.1, including support for SFTP’s “ProxyCommand” config setting, support for Amazon GovCloud, and brand-new French, German, and for the first time ever, Chinese, localizations.

How’d it do, then? What’s the business side of macOS productivity software like? I’m happy to say Transmit 5 sold quite well, all directly through our store. And the timing was (accidentally) totally great — just as Firewatch revenue was starting to wane as the game ran its course, Transmit 5 fully picked up the slack. It was comforting to see that people are still willing to pay real money for good Mac software. That’s why we’re here and can continue to do what we do.

One interesting note: We added a ton of new cloud services in Transmit, which is great, but it definitely adds an exponential burden to our QA process (many connection types × many functions = many many tests). Interestingly, to this day, still nothing beats the popularity of plain old SFTP, and, oh my stars, FTP. Yep, regular, unsecured FTP. Based on our anonymous usage data, that unnecessary donut chart on the right there shows how the connection types rank so far.

The purple and dark blue? That’s everything else – all cloud services combined. Were they worth adding? I think yes, as a bet on the future, but we’ll probably want to pick and choose future protocols extremely carefully.

Overall, this release had an extremely low goof-up ratio, but there were a few pain points. Our simplified activity window redesign was much cleaner and clearer for the people who just wanted to know what Transmit was doing, which we think is most people, but lost some really important functionality for users who need to manage their pending transfers more granularly. We’ll keep working on this in future versions. And some were disappointed that we didn’t provide an upgrade discount for our existing Transmit 4 customers. Normally we would’ve, except for that seven year gap — we’d been providing free updates for seven years, and that seemed like extremely good value for money? (Interestingly, many of the people upset by this had been using it for all seven years!) Finally, a couple people really couldn’t handle the new Sync toolbar icon! These things happen. There’s a reason it changed: it used to be , but now it’s , as the new button uses arrows, as well as the usual button, and it was just too many arrows!

But overall, it was extremely smooth sailing. And we’ll keep working on improving it even further, of course!

All of us at Panic would like to say thank you to everyone who bought Transmit 5. And thank you to everyone who sent us their ideas for Transmit 5 and beyond. I’d also like to say thank you to everyone at Panic, including of course Wade and Will who spearheaded this release, for doing such amazing work.

Faster?

We often write things like “we made it faster!” without going into much detail — that’s usually because the details are pretty gory. But, exclusively for this update, I thought I’d ask Wade, who did the bulk of the work in Transmit 5 with his brother Will, to get specific — what did we do to make Transmit 5 faster?

For those interested, let’s get technical!

////////
// // P A N I C
//////// E N G I N E E R I N G
//

When we sat down to start work on Transmit 5, we wanted to prioritize speed and the “cloud” (have you seen all the new cloud services Transmit 5 supports?!). While adding cloud services was fairly straightforward, improving speed can be a little more abstract. We approached the problem from the ground up and found obvious areas where we could improve and some that weren’t so obvious going into it.

The first and most obvious change we made to Transmit was how it handled transferring large file hierarchies. In prior versions of Transmit, when you started transferring a group of files and folders, it would transfer the top-level items using individual connections to the server, but the folders and their contents would be processed serially using one connection. This worked well if you were transferring many top-level folders, as they would be transferred concurrently, but transferring a single folder would only ever use one connection. With today’s fast internet connections and multi-core devices we felt it was time to fully multi-thread every possible transfer scenario. In Transmit 5, almost all transfers will use the maximum available connections regardless of their contents. (Some cloud services restrict the amount of API calls you can make to the service over a period of time, so those services are limited to two transfer connections.) This allows multiple connections to work on the contents of a single folder, which results in much faster transfers.

This in and of itself was a huge improvement, but we didn’t stop there.

Long-time Transmit users may remember that in Transmit 4 we introduced our patented (not really, but it’s still cool) dual progress bar. This style of progress representation shows the entire transfer progress as well as the current file’s progress in a single bar. While this was great for showing the user status about their transfers, the necessary pre-flighting to compute the entire transfer size was delaying the start of the transfer. In some cases we found the entire transfer could be completed in the amount of time it was taking Transmit just to compute the overall transfer size! Transmit 5 now computes the overall transfer size dynamically and asynchronously with the transfers themselves, so your transfers start immedately and you still get that sweet double progress bar.

Once we got the backend completely multi-threaded, we noticed that, under high stress transfers, the app could start to feel a little bogged down. Turns out, when you transfer thousands of files in a few seconds on gigabit ethernet there are a lot of messages being sent around internally. Folks who know programming know that you have to process user interface updates on the main thread, but that thread also handles user input, so if you’re overwhelming that thread with messages, your app can start to feel a bit sluggish. This was happening to Transmit, as it was servicing progress updates constantly. We developed a lightweight messaging queue that gathers updates from the connection threads, coalesces redundant messages, then batches the delivery to the main thread to update the user interface. The coalescing reduced many unnecessary progress updates and batching allowed us to fine tune the amount of work that the main thread would perform per update cycle. Likewise, we added a second layer of message throttling from our various connection classes to the message queue, which further reduced the amount of internal messaging while maintaining a high level of performance and responsiveness.

We left no stone unturned in our relentless pursuit of improving all aspects of Transmit’s performance, and memory usage was certainly included on that list. After all, your computer isn’t going to feel fast if memory is paging to disk all the time. We analyzed the memory consumption and to our surprise, NSScanner was using a very large amount of memory when parsing large directory listings. I wrote an API-compatible replacement that instantly eliminated the memory bloat and had the side benefit of being faster as well. That’s what we in the industry call a win-win. Beyond those parsing improvements, we restructured the way very large file transfers were handled to prevent temporary memory bloating as well. This means you can transfer multi-gigabyte files using Transmit and memory use will remain stable.

After the backend systems were performing at a high level, we turned our attention to the UI. Frequently drawing and animating progress bars can require a fair amount of CPU. In Transmit 4, when you had the transfers list visible with several transfers in progress, the CPU usage would tick up a few points (which our sharp-eyed users were quick to point out). Lucky for us, a few things happened in the computer world since Transmit 4 came out. User interface design trends are now much simpler and flatter, requiring far less work to draw. Additionally, highly performant layer-based drawing is better supported. We rewrote our progress bars to be CALayer-based, which reduced the CPU overhead tremendously. Those optimizations keep the main thread free to handle other tasks that keep the app feeling snappy.

All of this work resulted in massive speed improvements across the board when using Transmit. Not only are transfers dramatically faster, but the entire app benefits from the internal work across its various components. Occasionally while working on Transmit I’d think something was broken because the transfers would complete impossibly fast! It wasn’t just us that noticed these improvements either, we immediately heard from users about how much they were loving the speed of Transmit 5. -Wade

So when you see a single bullet point in a major Panic release that says “• Now faster!”, now you know.

Updates + Support

I asked Aaron, who handles a great deal of the QA and release process here at Panic, to talk a little bit about what we did, software and support-wise. He says:

In 2017 we shipped a record 39 software releases. Each one of those releases had to be qualified, tested, approved, and distributed. So, for our small team, this is a really solid accomplishment. Here’s what went out the door:

2.6.1

2.2.4

2.6

4.4.12

5.0b1

1.3.2

4.4.13

2.6.2

2.2.5

2.6.1

4.4.13

5.0b2

1.3.7

5.0

2.6.3

2.2.6

2.6.2

5.0b3

1.3.8

2.6.4

2.2.7

2.6.3

5.0b4

1.3.9

2.6.5

5.0b5

☠?

2.6.6

5.0b6

2.6.7

5.0b7

2.6.8

5.0b8

2.6.9

5.0

5.0.1

5.0.2

5.0.3

5.0.4

5.0.5

Improved QA

2017 also brought a number of improvements to our internal QA processes and organization.

We retooled our testing documentation using new features introduced in GitLab and formalized a new release workflow to better coordinate our Portland and Japan offices.

The Transmit 5 development process also resulted in the creation of new internal tools for testing and verification:

Fig • Quickly build, snapshot, and deploy macOS configuration profilesHydra • Panic’s authentication and file transfer testing systemPug • Quickly update local projects and their dependencies with a single commandVanderbilt • Browse and download builds of Panic apps using the command line or GUI

We’ll spare you any overly specific details for now, but if people are interested we could do a more extensive write-up in a future blog post. Let us know! ?

Improved User Help

In addition to all of the fun new tools we used internally, there are also some helpful new user-facing resources we’re really excited about. First, we introduced a dynamic Panic Help Library inspired by Acorn 5’s Live Help Search. (In his write-up, our pal Gus of Flying Meat said “If you make a Mac app, please steal this idea”, so, like, we did! But no, if he jumped off a bridge, we wouldn’t.)

Here’s what our new live help looks like in our app:

All of those help articles are being pulled from our server in real-time when you search! That means we can add new features or documentation at any time without needing to push an update to Transmit itself, and as a result our help is ever-evolving and ever-helpful, and everybody wins.

Tutorial Videos

Right near the end of the year, we debuted the first of our Transmit 5 tutorial videos. For years we’ve been wanting to show off cool tips and tricks in our software in the most visual and dynamic way possible, but didn’t exactly have the time or bandwidth to make it work until Christa came on board. Now we’ve got video coming out of our ears! And eyes. And computers.

And a request: if you have topics you’d like to see covered in a future video please let us know. We have a whole lot of exciting new things planned for 2018!

This is the real engine that keeps Panic moving and software going out the door. Our process continues to improve significantly year-over-year. Also I like that Aaron uses emoji in his updates.

Services

It’s a huge part of our business we don’t discuss much: our backend services that help you sync your data, process your orders, and the like. Here’s Patrick with a brief summary on our service work for 2017:

The site had numerous under-the-hood changes to support a big internal effort — modernizing our web store.

For years (almost 20 years, in fact) our web store was powered by a custom PHP app we wrote called POD, or the Panic Order Database. It grew a lot over time, to handle sales of physical goods, product activations, Coda plug-ins, and all kinds of other things. It became a little long in the tooth, and in 2017, seeking a more flexible and modern architecture, we decided it was time to retool.

Building off our great experience with Django in Panic Sync, we starting rewriting our order system as a Django app, cutting out slices of functionality and migrating them over bit-by-bit. In a true Ship of Theseus fashion, almost all backend pieces have now been replaced by their Django counterparts – now complete with tests, code coverage checking, Python 3.6 type hinting, and other great tooling improvements.

Also, Panic Sync 2.0 shipped, the headlining feature of which was 2-Factor Authentication. We added a huge number of new users quickly – over 10,000 in a very short period of time. (And speaking of big numbers and weird backend services, our firewatch.camera project is still running strong, currently hosting over 680GB of in-game photos across over 54,000 rolls.)

We’ve standardized on Django across all our web services and we couldn’t be happier with it. Python 3.6 and Django 2.0 offer a great developer experience, modern tooling, and years of stability. Hey, if it’s good enough for Instagram, it’s good enough for us!

This work is always ongoing and represents a huge part of what we do.

Infrastructure

A bit more from Patrick:

At the risk of sounding corporate and corny, we’d like to say that independence has always been a core value of Panic. As such, it should be no surprise that we think of our web services in the same way: while we believe companies like AWS, Heroku, and DigitalOcean all provide valuable services, we still prefer to build our sites on our own servers and infrastructure – the same way many of our own customers do. We have the know-how, gumption, and by-golly, the stick-to-itiveness [this is gonna be tough for Noby to translate into Japanese! —Ed.] to do it, so why not?

Over the past year, James has been busy upgrading the hardware that we have colocated at the Pittock Building (a few blocks from Panic in sunny Portland, Oregon) significantly, as well as rebuilding most of our servers to run on shared, virtualized host clusters, set up and managed by Ansible. Using Gitlab, we now have continuous deployment for all of our sites, keeping us in line with modern web development best practices.

These improvements have proved to be so fast and stable that in 2017 we moved all of Panic Sync off Heroku and onto our own infrastructure. For the paranoid among you – don’t worry. Your data is still safe: you can read more about how we encrypt your data so even we can’t read it on our Panic Sync page and library article.

Speaking of security, we’ve also upped our encryption game internally: all source code interaction now requires 2FA, and we’re requiring Yubikey or Krypton for private key storage. We’re thinking of doing a separate post from the engineering department to dive a little more deeply into our security setup, so if you’re interested in that, please leave a comment and let us know (and don’t forget to smash that like button!) [There is no like button —Ed.]

If you ever have questions about this stuff, let us know!

Successes

So, looking back, here’s what I was proud of from 2017:

We still ship pretty nice software. I mean, we’re definitely not perfect, but we’re making really quality things, I think. Transmit 5 modernized the UI, added a ton of stuff, increased speed, and was an extremely solid release that a lot of people bought. As long as we can keep doing this well, we’ll hopefully be here for a while.

We’re still having fun on the web. The Transmit 5 website is, I think, really nice, especially thanks to our WebGL truck magic. We worked with Little Workshop (look for a blog post about that in the future!) who took Kenichi’s 3D icon and make it work on the web. (They were also not afraid when we said “and also the perspective of the truck should change when you scroll!”.) And thanks to Dean at Apple on making it extra performant in Safari. I think it’s a good sign when your crazy product web page leads to overall improvements in Safari for everyone.

Our support is better than ever. In addition to the improvements mentioned above, including our Panic Library, I think our response times are fast, our answers are accurate and helpful, and people in general hopefully feel that when they buy something from us, we have their back. (And when we fail, we fix it!)

Oh and we expanded our work area and added a couple trees. It’s almost all done.

Challenges

Not everything was silky smooth sailing in 2017, including:

iOS, again, as always. We have not cracked the secret of how to be super successful making advanced productivity software on iOS. (In fact, quite the opposite — we canceled Transmit iOS, our portable file transfer client, due to poor sales.) I’ve talked about this for many years running, but I’m hopeful this is the year we’re gonna crack it. In the meantime, we’re still dedicated to updating and improving Prompt and Coda, our iOS apps that can justify increased investment.

We got owned hard. We blogged about it at length right here. It wasn’t exactly our favorite time. But I can give two small addenda to that story: we never heard a word from the attacker after we threw all our cards on the table via that blog post… and the law enforcement investigation is, amazingly, still ongoing.

We don’t have enough engineers. Our dream of “an engineer permanently assigned to every app” continues to be strained with our current, rather intense workload. And low iOS revenue doesn’t give a lot of room for growth. There’s a lot of juggling to keep everything updated. But, it’s time to staff up. Read on for more about that.

Our process still has room for improvement. Defining features and releases more concretely, and putting more time into UI up-front before code gets written (including building in time for design prototyping) so that UI designs are ready and more thought out earlier, are just a few of the things I hope to see get better.

Tough revenue decisions. We continue to debate about how much longer people will be accepting of full price macOS software. Is it time for us to consider subscription pricing, which could lead to frequent and constant Panic software releases, instead of saving up for big “major updates”, which sounds really appealing? On the other hand, we know a lot of people don’t like subscriptions, for many valid reasons. We’ll have to do more research on this throughout 2018.

Q&A

① Do you have plans for Prompt on macOS? —Lukas and Josh and Mike etc.
We talk about this idea a lot! While we’re not working on it right now, I’ve always thought it’s a good idea…

② Are you involved at all with Campo Santo’s next game? —MichaelWe’re not. You may have heard that the team at Campo Santo now all work for Valve, a move that will allow them to focus more on making games and less on running a business at a scale well beyond what we could provide them. Frankly, it’s still a little hard for us, as we truly enjoyed working with them. But, we can’t wait to play their game some day. And soon we’re announcing our second game as a publisher — more on that below!

③ Who’s behind the lovely videos that have been shared recently? How long do they take to make? —Dave
Christa does those! She consults with engineers/support/QA to understand the goal of the video, she writes the script, she does all the After Effects work, even the voiceovers. (I do a bit of copy editing on the scripts and try to write original music for them as much as possible!) A typical video takes… a week?

④ Will you ever make shirts again because some of my favorite shirts are lookin kinda rough ?? —MikeThis is a very good idea. We really should do another run of Panic shirts. Maybe we can pull this off in 2018.

⑤ Any plans to bring Verso to BeOS?—ChrisHow… how do you remember this incredibly obscure bit of Panic trivia… Verso, geez.

⑥ You probably get this a lot, but would it be possible to get an office tour some day? —JoanIn general, yes! It depends on what we have going on on a given day, what’s lying around, and if I’m in the office (most people here are a little scared of humans), but it’s always possible. Twitter is a good way to schedule that!

⑦ Can you talk about any projects that you thought of, started, but then abandoned?—kmikeymWe once canceled a very polished and beautiful iOS music sharing app called… Audion. (I’m not kidding!) Kinda like a musical Instagram. It had at least one UI thing that I still think is original and amazing. Someday we’ll tell that story.

⑧ Any update/change about the last status of ? Transmit for iOS?—FredWe are still working on our plans, starting with: is there a way we can bring more of Transmit iOS’s functionality to Coda iOS? That would be a big change to Coda iOS, but might make the most logical sense. Stay tuned.

⑨ I’m using Transmit 5 as my primary interface to Dropbox. Am I a bad person?—KyleAbsolutely not. This is so potentially powerful, we even made a video about it!

⑩ Is it just me or is it cold in here…?—AshurAshur, we’ve been over this, it’s hot outside right now so, YES, the cooling kicked in, that’s what office HVAC systems do, they COOL or they HEAT. Maybe our next bonus should just be JACKETS??? [Ashur works at Panic and is also responsible for the Slack channel #planet-hoth. —Ed.]

What’s Next

In addition to maintaining all of our apps, which, remember, we are doing always, here are the big things in store:

Firewatch for Switch

Look for it later this year!

A Second Game

Soon we will also announce the second video game we’ll be publishing! The follow-up to our hit game Firewatch will be a new game from a different studio that is not at all like Firewatch but is absolutely delightful. Keep an eye on our blog and Twitter for the big reveal.

Coda Next

Great news! Our work on the next version of CODA® is well underway. Here are some facts I’m allowed to share about this project.

A lot has changed in the web development world since we first started working on Coda, not the least of which is a new set of really capable (and often free) competitors.

To catch up to today, we had to take a dramatic step. We’ve been informally calling it Coda Next during production. (We may even rebrand the product entirely, since it’s a dramatic step forward from today’s Coda.) It’s a total rewrite of our macOS version of Coda. We’re taking everything we’ve learned from the past, everything we learn doing modern web development here every day, and everything we’ve heard from our customers, and we’re totally redefining Coda for the future. Expect support for cutting-edge development and deployment workflows, ways to make your work easier, a light bloat-free design, and most importantly, 100% macOS native code so it’s extremely fast and responsive. This will be a huge update.

But, how far along are we? We’ve completed work on the “editor core”, i.e. the editor itself, i.e. the real meat-and-potatoes part of Coda Next. We’re using a brand new engine based heavily on Coda iOS, and including much-requested features like multiple cursors and a minimap. We’re really happy with it so far, and many of us are using it internally for our day-to-day editing already.

Coda has always been more than just an editor, though, so now we move on to the rest of the app, which is a lot. Some features may go, some may stay, but everything’s getting a re-think.

I have long ago learned not to predict release dates, so I won’t even try. While work is progressing rapidly, we still have a whole lot to do. But are we excited for you to see what we’ve got? Very!

Hiring

Something extremely rare is happening at Panic: we’re about to bring a few more people on board. Because it’s so very important to our success in 2018 and beyond, I’m gonna slap a <blink> tag on that: we’re hiring soon!

And if you know anyone looking for a nice job in a nice city writing nice software, send them our way.

(My god that blink is really awful, no wonder it was deprecated, sorry.)

Misc

We continue to work extremely hard on extremely bonus projects, as we have for a few years now, and I sure hope we’ll have a surprise or two for you in 2018.

Thank You

I always get a little sentimental writing these posts — borderline trite, to be honest — but it’s really astonishing that we continue to be able to do what we enjoy, day-in and day-out, and that’s all thanks to you. Recently I spur-of-the-tweet offered free Panic stickers and it brought piles of nice cards and letters to our office which really physically drove the point home: we are extraordinarily lucky to have such great customers and fans. Your support of the things we make, be it Transmit 5 or a game like Firewatch or even a Katamari t-shirt you bought a billion years ago, it all has helped us immeasurably. And we hope that we have improved your life a little bit in return.

Chase

Hopefully Coda Next will still be a great tool for writing Python code as well as all of the other “non web” languages. Coda with the Terminal built in is honestly one of the only reasons I stay here and don’t find an alternative editor. <3

weston Deboer

Robert Palmer

If there is one company that is singlehandedly responsible for my success as a web developer, it’s you all at Panic. I literally couldn’t do my job without you, and I shudder to think about a future when I have to switch to those free and open source tools you mention. Please keep doing what you’re doing, and being the awesome company you are. Love you all!

Nicolas Da Mutten

Nice to hear you have plans for Coda! The fact that it’s gonna be native probably is making it an instant buy for me!
Since I use Coda daily for php web work, I’m extremely excited to hear about multiple cursors and probably would even pay for a beta version ;) (I’d even write bug reports, promise!)

Phil

Chad A

NSScanner::
Can you give additional details on the “API-compatible replacement” for NSScanner? Is this just using low-level C (or perhaps higher level Obj-C or Swift) to replicate NSScanner’s functionality or are there newer API methods to replace NSScanner?

Dropbox + Transmit::
If you are wondering if the cloud services are used in Transmit, the answer is an unequivocal and resounding YES. Being able to access my Dropbox content without having to sync everything to each of my computers has been the #1 feature I wanted from Dropbox. I miss having the WebDAV-based iDisk, so being able to use Transmit + Dropbox is the next best thing. I’ve been using Transmit since the Mac OS 9 days, and being able to connect to Dropbox is one of the biggest and most useful features ever added.

Transmit for iOS::
I was sad to see that Transmit for iOS was retired. It is an app I do actively use and hope it will continue to work for as long as possible. Once it stops working in some future version of iOS, I’m hoping that there will be a suitable replacement.

Coda + Subscription Software::
I still use Coda 1 for my personal web development, but never could get into Coda 2. I used WebStorm for some hybrid/PhoneGap development, which was an interesting approach to designing for mobile web and apps. I’ve also been looking at static site generators like Jekyll, and it would be interesting to see an app with ties to such type of web development. WebStorm was pretty nice, but the app is now useless to me, since it requires a yearly subscription to use. I completely LOATHE any and all types of software subscriptions. This is why I don’t use Adobe CC, Office 365, or play World of Warcraft. Please, please stay away from software subscriptions. Last year, I had to “fix” an iOS app after a company decided to go the subscription route, which locked out all of their previous paid users, and that caused a huge uproar.

BLINK tag::
I didn’t recall the much maligned blink tag making it over to modern HTML implementations, so I had to check out your version of “blink”. Haha! Panic still has a great sense of humor.

Lennart

I have no inherent problem with subscriptions, definitely for apps that have an ongoing component like cloud sync. If you do switch, please consider the Sketch model: you pay yearly for updates, but if you stop paying you can keep using your current version indefinitely.

Angel V

You guys rock. I started using the new Transmit last year and it’s been keeping my projects organized. Can’t wait to see what the next version of Coda will bring. If you need beta testing on it, I’m down.

Jake

Marc

Love hearing the updates and so glad things are going so well for you all up there in the north! I’m excited to hear about Coda developments (I use it every day!) and glad to hear you are working on a new game. Firewatch was amazing. Keep up the great work!

Kenneth Lindbeck-Dahlstrøm

I switched from Coda til Atom a few years ago, but I still use Coda for find/replace. I love how easy the interface is in Coda. The killer feature that would make me switch back to Coda as my main editor would be cross coding/projects between Mac and iPad. I would love to be able to continue a project I’m currently working on at my Mac on the iPad. The iPad version would have to run a terminal and localhost to compile and display the app.

Skylor

Scott M

David

I have no problems with subscriptions. They provide you with a sustainable source of income, which in turn means you’re able to maintain and improve the apps I need. Speaking from personal experience, I think the “charge-once-but-maintain-forever” business model just doesn’t work.

Wade

@Chad A The version I wrote kept the same public API as NSScanner but replaced the implementation with my own Obj-C. I kept the API the same since it works well for our needs and it prevented additional churn elsewhere in the code base.

Steve A

If Coda could offer me the sort of intellisense I get from products like VS Code when writing TypeScript, or PhpStorm when writing PHP, coupled with all of the amazing features in editors like Sublime Text, VS Code, Atom, etc. I would happily pay a lot of money for it. Leaving Coda was really sad – your team produces exceptionally nice, fast, reliable user experiences. Somehow, slower and uglier applications still allow me to be more productive. I’d love to chat about it if you’re interested in hearing about different work flows to accommodate.

Ben

I find it intriguing, when referring to Audion, that you said “Someday we’ll tell that story.” You already did tell the story! It’s still on the panic website too (https://panic.com/extras/audionstory). It is a fascinating story though! Unless, you meant one day you’ll tell the story of the ”at least one UI thing” you still think is original and amazing- I’d be interested in hearing about that :-)

Cabel

@ben The Audion I’m talking about was a brand new app for iOS, focus on sharing music you love with other people. Not the old Audion, nor the old Audion story! So I guess there’s a second Audion story that needs to be told. ;)

Joern

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that my main reason to buy the awesome new Transmit 5 is the support for AppleScript. Maybe you are not sure if anybody uses it, but for me it is essential.

With macOS HighSierra it‘s no longer possible to mount a server without a login window waiting for manuel entry (for example if the script would login to a server at night). But Transmit can do this. Woohoo! Maybe this is useful for a lot of people who run automated scripts at night. More documentation or sample scripts could help those people.

Transmit is a super easy to use and and yet powerful tool. Everyone who doesn’t buy it is a fool!

Greg

Steve

I am generally not a fan of subscription models for software but I would happily pay one for Transmit on iOS. You have a premium product and are able to price it accordingly. I’ve bought a number of Panic products over the years and will continue throwing money at you if you can figure out a new way to charge me for Transmit on iOS!

François

I love what you do and you are for me poster child of the quality indie mac app market. I hope you will be able to do this for ever and I thank you for your product.

Whishlist:
I might be alone on this one, but one of my big use of coda is to write scripts for remote linux servers. After all it has amazing feature to remotely manage *nix: ssh, transfer and an editor. Support for non-web language would indeed be great.

Subscriptions:
Tough debate, but most of your app are related. Maybe you could offer an « enterprise subscription » on a bundle of product and tranditional pricing for individual ones, kind of an in-between princing, to server different crowds and budgets?

Internal tools:
Ship them! :-)

Blair

Fantastic update as always. Re: subscription pricing, I have lots of thoughts about where I see it going. Long / short, if you do go that route, I feel like (as mentioned above) Sketch has a very fair model, as do other apps that continue to allow you to access your data if you don’t renew your subscription. The thought that I won’t be able to properly open my InDesign files if I ever cancel my CC subscription is, quite frankly, terrifying.

Mario Palomera

I would have loved for Transmit for iOS to become something like a framework app to up anything on top of it. Like a simple photo editor app to upload images taken on an iPhone to an sftp server. On the other end I was a die hard fan of Coda but then fell in love with textMate then moved on to VisualStudio for job reasons and that´s it. It would have been amazing that Coda would have evolved more in hand with wen technologies and replace textMate. All that said I still admire all the stuff your company does and the culture around. Btw Audion could be a blessing if it revives to replace iTunes. Apple killed offline music, someone should bring it back!! Bring the iPod spirit back to the mac and to iOS!

Chris

Thank you as always for this. Wish more companies were transparent about where they were, why they did what they did and where they are going. People in general give much more slack to companies that respect them as Panic does. Bravo! I’ve used Transmit faithfully nearly daily since as long as I can remember. I used Coda for a while many years ago back in the days when Coda, Espresso and other’s were popping up to offer a mac friendly alternative to heavy weights like Dreamweaver that were bloated and didnt embrace Mac’s core features. Eventually, moved on from Coda, because understandably it remained focused on more newbies and designers dabbling in code. Most of us at time used TextMate, until it went away then Sublime, and now Atom is unmatched. I wish Atom was native MacOS code and had iOS counterpart, and embraced all of Mac’s special features, but while Coda does that, Atom’s countless open source extensions and ability to open and search immediately make it far above for seasoned devs. And Atom doesn’t have the GUI bloat of Coda, and the ui can be easily customized with css (like inception and great themes to start with). From your post it sounds like you will be heading more into the direction of Atom, which is great. The main issue would be extensions. If there were some way to leverage Atom extensions like Sublime let you use TextMate transitions, it could be a real contender. Otherwise most won’t switch because their favorite extension isn’t available for Coda, and people won’t build extensions for it since most devs arent using it, and unfortunate catch 22. Also since it’s not free/open source like Atom. Perhaps there is some business model where its free, but extra features are paid upgrades or something to make it sustainable.

While Atom and Coda having a baby to make Coda Next is unlikely, so glad you the Mac Community has you working on these challenges.

Jayson Garrett

I use Coda 2 every day at work, and love it. If I had a request about anything regarding it, it might be to keep it a good place for non-web devs to work, as my daily work is mainly with SQL scripts. And even though I love Coda, I would probably use the hell out of a Mac version of Prompt. ?

Matt Homer

José Netto

Have been using Transmit for a long time and I’m a really big fan of it.

I really hope that you launch a Prompt version for macOS. I have been using Hyper (https://hyper.is) and it’s cooler than other macOS terminals and offers a plugin ecosystem that adds up to the terminal experience. Check it out: https://file-ldcasuufol.now.sh.

For editing my code I have been using Sublime Text which is speedy and have lots of great plugins.

I have used Atom and Visual Studio Code, but the overhead that those editors play on system resources is unbelievable.

GryphonClaw Software

Thank you all for the update! I’m super excited that you all revealed you’re working on Coda now, awesome! I can’t wait to see what the new version brings. I currently use Coda 2 for all of my web development. Keep up the good work! More info on Coda as you can make it available would be greatly appreciated!

J.C.Burns

Reuben

I cannot wait for Coda Next. Multiple cursors has had me looking longingly at VS Code, it is the one feature making me think about switching…but as a long time Coda user (I think since 2007), it is such a part of my daily routine, I just can’t switch. Hearing that my #1 feature request is coming is so good to hear! If you need any other suggestions… connecting to Postgres and being able to preview views from a Rails App would make Coda my all inclusive tool! In any case, keep up the good work!

Diyan

Guys do you actually understand that what made PANIC great was Coda? Not anything else.

I am so tired of waiting for the Next Coda.. or Coda Next.. or whatever you call it. I am actually quite mad that you made us wait so long. What made me want to punch you in the face guys was your turn towards game development – a total WTF moment! .. we have been sitting here waiting for an update to the only app that actually we cared about and you decided to have fun developing games? Come on, that was the dumbest move you could have come up.

Honestly I don’t expect the “Next” anytime soon, I will be quite surprised if you even mentioned in a blog post in 2018 again.
This is how bad I feel about you right now.

Don’t get me wrong, I will buy as soon as you release it. I just hope the world hasn’t gone mad and started WW3 until you finally do. Then who cares if we have a new code editor, when there will be no internet. Better release soon and save the world from going mad!

Gregor

Prosa:
I started using Coda in 2008, I think. After I trashed my Windows PC Coda was the only web coding software that I liked to work with. As I am using PHP Storm for 1.5 years now (for a few backend projects) I asked myself why I use Coda. The point of using Coda is something I would call comfort or a good feeling. When I compare Coda with php Storm Coda is light and nice… and php Storm is a festure monster! Just take a look at the preferences window … wtf! In opinion php Storm and Coda are just different applications that are hard to compare. I have 2 main use cases for coding: me as a freelancer in a 10 people team… were using php Storm as we are doong lot of backend stuff; me as a one man show business: I use Coda and it‘s perfect to build/refine/publish TYPO3 and WordPress Themes, do some stuff in Comsole and support that old just-HTML website of my dads old friend.
Somehow for me Panic is that good guy in the city far far away that builds tools I just lile to use because it looks good, feels good, is solid and …

Panic, I feel like were friends ?!

Thank you for the good work in the past years – I am really thrilled to see what‘ll be next about Coda! And well… whem I think of Panic T-Shirts or that funny festure that I could change the color of your logo on top of your building … well it is just cool, that you are kind of real persons tor me, allthough we never even met before and althougj that sad: the chamce of meeting each other isnt that big ?

Panic, please keep going!

Cheers from Berlin to Portland

Gregor

Attila

A good iOS IDE is a market gap, and so far there only very weak candidates in this segment. I am waiting for an updated version of Coda for iOS, that is capable to do web development. I think there is a definite market for this.

Diego

Lindsay

I just started using Coda 2 because Atom, Sublime, VS Code, etc… because I require a built-in FTP client for my workflow. The FTP extensions for Atom and the like are all terrible and difficult to use. I also want an interface that doesn’t require hunting down and testing 100 extensions to make it do what I want. I’m a front-end developer and write some PHP for wordpress, and Coda 2 was the sweet spot of not being bloated, allowing some customization, but also being user-friendly for someone who isn’t a super backend dev. Please don’t forfeit people like me with Coda Next! All the improvements mentioned in the blog sound great, but if you make it another Atom, then I’ll be forced to find another solution after just finally settling on Coda 2 as my preferred app. Also, I hate subscription pricing models, so that would be a dealbreaker for me. Please consider grandfathering in your existing users if you choose to go that route. Thanks for considering my feedback!

José

Chris Barrus

If you’re counting the replies (demographic: 30+ year macOS developer/user) I’m fine with full-price software but I absolutely do not and will not use subscription software. I split from Adobe and Ulysses for this reason.

J. Svensson

I would like to request more frequent updates on how the new Coda app is progressing. The updates are too far between. I would like nothing else than continue using your more-than-average-polished software, but not knowing when to expect the next major release makes my head turn looking for competing products. I’m surely not the only one that considers moving on from Coda 2 and I believe transparency is the way to keep our loyalty.

Eric Knibbe

Michael Mc

will coda next be compatible with system 9?
I’m very happy your dedicating time to Coda, yes it’s true we now have vscode and others, but much of them are based in electron, they always break and you have to restart to gain all the features back, electron has it issues, I would prefer to pay something and get a native app. But to be honest the layout concept behind vscode is fantastic, open documents list, click to show, double click to show and leave open, small things like that make it in my list better than sublime

I also think is better more small updates like vs does it (every month… BANG! new features)

Thanks for everything

sakura

Wow! I am a big fan of Coda but it is now pretty far from the latest trend. I work on making front-end javascript programs with either Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code these days. Both are great apps but one is a bit complicated and the other is a little slow for me. I am looking forward to sophisticated and light-weighted Coda 3. I often come to this blog to find new information about Coda and now found it. I am very excited!

Bryan Harris

Subscription is good if done right. Large businesses will pay more for a one time license so they don’t have to mess with it again, but for me, I’d love to see a subscription model where I pay per hour of transfer or active use, maybe $0.25/hr. up to ~$5/mo, min $0.50 per month. With that, you get a small amount that I wouldn’t notice each month regardless but that would add up for you, and my liability is capped if I find myself using it a lot in a given month. As it is, the new update isn’t compelling enough to justify the full upgrade so you’re getting nothing from me. Just a thought.